Why do liberals, every brand of liberal, refuse to admit that paternalism, surrogacy, and forcing adoptions of the impoverished across the global to wealthier Westerners doesn’t work? Because they’ve inherited the philosophy of eugenics – the eugenics of the poor – from historically progressive thinkers and leaders. Taking up the banner from the conservative fundamentalists, liberals now wage their own social war on motherhood, families, and whatever they deem “traditionalist.” Poverty gives liberals the excuse they need to stamp out any lifestyle choices that offends them.

The limousine liberal lifestyle is especially supported by a punitive, paternalistic approach to poverty and a welfare system. Perverting democratic socialism, they regulate the poor to dependents, only giving them just enough. When someone begins to work their way out of poverty, the current welfare system abruptly yanks all assistance. There’s no constructive path to the middle-class. We have PhDs on food stamps in America because the “Ivory Tower” academic elite has mandated a surplus of “adjunct instruction” positions. This leaves more money for the administrators to “earn.” The Left needs an underclass to clean their toilets – to do the jobs they don’t want to do. And if they had no one to look down upon, they couldn’t play savior to the less fortunate.

Liberals typically do not view a mother caring for her own child as work. But a woman going to work at a daycare to take care of other women’s children is work. This brain fart of irrational thought isn’t just hypocrisy – it’s classism and misogyny coming straight from those who claim to be for the poor and women. Maybe this is why liberals get offended when we call maternity leave what it is – maternity leave.

Every kind of liberal talks about the “war on women” as they make their own very insidious, passive-aggressive war on women. It was conservatives who typically forced adoptions via their churches and charities, just as it was, and is, liberals who support adoption trafficking today. Historically, progress thinkers that liberals claim as their own role models committed egregious crimes recognized today as human rights violations and holocausts.

Philanthropists and historical “progressives” of the twentieth century, either celebrated or conveniently forgotten today, financed and extolled eugenics programs of various methods. Alexander Graham Bell, the Carnegies and Rockefellers, even the Roosevelts and Oliver Wendell Holmes supported eugenics as an answer to poverty, inter-racial peoples, immigrants, and other “undesirables.”

An appalling number of people supported the movement, in voice and in finance. Alexander Graham Bell was a staunch supporter of the movement, and thought that deaf people should not be allowed to marry. Many eugenics projects got their financing from some of the corporate moguls of the day, including the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad conglomerate. In fact, the Carnegies founded and funded the Cold Spring Harbor research facility, one of the largest centers of eugenics activities (more on that in a minute). And it was the Rockefellers who put up the money behind a branch of eugenics in Europe—that was a German branch that counted Joseph Mengele in its ranks.

They also funded organizations like the German Psychiatric Institute, which in turn gave rise to one of Hitler’s most instrumental minds in medical repression, Ernst Rudin. The United States Supreme Court was also on board, upholding the laws of the eugenics movement, and one of the leaders of the American eugenic movement, Madison Grant, received a fan letter from none other than Adolf Hitler, praising his work as inspiring. While much of the financial support of families like the Rockefellers ended before the official beginning of World War II, they had already helped set things in motion.” (Listverse.com)

The Civil War, Reconstruction, and Great Depression hit the American South hard. The region is still recovering to this day. And its the poor, the poor from every racial background, that has suffered. (The Antebellum old money still exists; they’ve always done just fine.) The forced sterilization of poor southerners was the Progressive Era answer to extreme poverty:

“Thirty-two states passed eugenic-sterilization laws during the twentieth century, and between sixty and seventy thousand people were sterilized under them. The rhetoric of the movement toned down after the U.S. went to war with Germany; most American eugenicists abandoned their explicit praise of the Nazi project, and the field dwindled as an area of officially sanctioned research. (The disassociation did not go both ways: Buck v. Bell was cited by the defense at Nuremberg.) But the sterilization rate remained high even after the Second World War. So many poor Southerners underwent the procedure that it became known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” It was only in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, with evolving attitudes toward civil and human rights, that states began repealing their sterilization laws.” (The New Yorker: The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement)

The current adoption laws that allow for forced adoptions today originated with the infamous child-killer, Georgia Tann, and the judges and civic leaders who aided and abetted her in the kidnappings of thousands of infants and toddlers from poor Southerners.

“…First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt believed her to be an expert in the field of childcare. Perhaps no one in the State of Tennessee had more to do with the confidentiality laws adopted by the General Assembly than Georgia Tann. Miss Tann used those laws to her advantage and apparently destroyed, altered or otherwise tampered with birth records to the extent where it became impossible to determine the parentage of thousands of children.
Miss Georgia Tann turned adoption into a money-making enterprise and at a time when adoptions in Tennessee cost the princely sum of $7, some adoptions brokered by Tann cost as much as $5,000, roughly the equivalent of $84,000 in today’s currency. Miss Tann operated her Tennessee Children’s Home Society before the extensive welfare state existed in this country; there was little in the way of support, financial or otherwise, single mother’s could count on at the time.” (Knoxville Focus)

Tann is not forgotten in the South as she is the other regions of the United States. The American South, specifically Tennessee, was where she operated. Colluding with one of only two female judges in the South, Judge Camille Kelley, Tann operated the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. She supplied infants and toddlers to the Hollywood elites – a practice that still occurs in the South via coercive adoptions and surrogacy through private agencies such as Adoption Rocks of Mobile, Alabama.

You could never sell the story of Georgia Tann as fiction. Imagine trying to peddle a novel about a butch lesbian—in Depression-era Memphis, of all places—with a taste for fine cars and fancy houses, who makes a fortune stealing children from poor folks and selling them to anyone anywhere with sufficient cash. This she-devil is assisted by dozens of accomplices, including a crooked judge and the most powerful politician in the state. She’s also a pedophile, molesting the little ones before putting them up for sale. She operates virtually unhindered from 1924-1950, then conveniently dies just as she’s about to be exposed. Any publisher would reject such a tale as absurdly implausible, not to mention politically incorrect. Sadly, Barbara Bisantz Raymond didn’t have to worry about that with The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption (Union Square Press, 320 pp., $12.95). Tann’s crimes were all too real, and Raymond recounts them in carefully researched, awful detail.” (Nashville Scene)

Ironically, the author of The Baby Thief is an adoptive parent. Her insightful observation in regards to her attempt to understand Tann’s crimes: “As Raymond observes, ‘Georgia was a woman unable to directly partake of the traditional source of female power: marriage and the bearing of children.’ By taking control of other women’s babies, Tann acted out her resentment, and at the same time enjoyed a vicarious sense of maternity.” Is the author echoing a type of “womb envy” sentiment of the current Left?

Is this creepy covert form of misogyny yet to be recognized in the mainstream because it’s politically incorrect to call out wrong-doing of the LGBT community? Homosexual male celebrities buy themselves babies via surrogates and egg donors: “In an exclusive sit down with Oprah Winfrey, to air this Sunday, the proud papas introduced the blonde tots and told the complicated story of how they were born. […] It involved two embryos, one for each of them – and a surrogate who Burtka said was ‘more like the oven’.”
(DailyMail.com) Yes, they called their surrogate an “oven.”

If members of the LGBT community want to experience parenthood and “traditional” family, why not ethically adopt a child through the foster care system? Why pursue what even the United Nations has deemed a human rights violation – surrogacy? Surrogacy, and even egg donation, involves intensive hormonal treatments resulting in lasting scars and negative health consequences on a woman’s body. The risks of surrogacy can and have lead to death. (American Surrogate Death: NOT the First, Death and Other Scandals of Surrogate-Mother Contracts) And it is poor women, desperate to provide for their families, who turn to surrogacy as an answer.

Surrogacy sounds like a dystopia pulled right from a Margaret Atwood novel. However, just a few weeks ago, a respected classical liberal/new atheist social commentator* privately argued with me that surrogacy is “the woman’s choice.” But without the means – financial means – to say no, there is no free choice. Furthermore, are these women informed of the dangers surrogacy, even egg donation, to their health and life? (The Guardian: “Cross-border surrogacy: exploiting low income women as biological resources?”) exposes this increasingly global practice of using women as walking wombs: “In this globalised economy, surrogacy has quickly become a lucrative business. The same women who stitch our clothes can now, thanks to biotechnology, also produce our children. The neoliberal Indian economic miracle is reaching beyond the employment of local labour in call centres and factories and into the extraction of biological vitality.”

Is it really a choice when it’s a piss-poor option, or the only choice? No. But classical and limousine liberals will claim surrogacy is a choice. One would think that classical liberals, especially with the new atheists in their ranks, would recognize that even their demagogue, the Jesus Christ of new atheism – Sam Harris, states that free will doesn’t exist. But it doesn’t fit their narrative and agenda of unnaturally supplying babies to friends who can’t naturally have babies if they recognized these options and “choices” are anything but free.

“In the media, the women are cast either as the lucky winners of a life-changing sum of money or as victims, forced by their poverty into “renting out their wombs”. Sociologists such as Amrita Pande argue that this binary deprives women of their agency, and that paid surrogacy should instead be framed as a form of work, no matter how problematic. Between 2010 and 2014, I spoke to 33 surrogate mothers and egg donors living on the outskirts of Mumbai. It was clear that, within their limited options, they made a choice to do these jobs. It was also obvious that they had little power in those deals and that they had the most to lose. Instead of sharing a meaningful connection, the foreign intended parents and surrogate mothers I met knew little more about one another than workers and customers on the far ends of any other global supply chain.” (The Guardian: “The Trouble with Renting a Womb)

There are organizations and individuals speaking out against surrogacy. The NC Family Policy Council of North Carolina addresses the global problem of surrogacy as well as the domestic practice of surrogacy in America. Jennifer Lahl, founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, produced the documentary Breeders exposing the dangers of surrogacy:

“It’s very clear that what the woman is being paid to do, or contracted to do, is to use her body for nine months in a pregnancy and deliver a child, and often this is managed by contract, which leaves the surrogate mother very exposed. And at the end of the day, she’s being paid to deliver a product, a baby. If that’s not commodification of a woman’s body and a child…we call that human trafficking, we call that baby trade, and we call that baby buying and baby selling. That’s what is really happening here. And you can’t dress it up and make it any other way other than literally the hiring of a woman to produce a baby for sale.

Again, this is a market-driven enterprise. This isn’t medicine, you know you don’t negotiate with your doctor as normally when you enter into the healthcare system, but this is a market-driven thing. I’m in California, and out here in Hollywood-land where we have very wealthy celebrities, surrogates can make [between $20,000] to $50,000. Repeat surrogacy pays even better because you have been proven to demonstrate that not only can you carry a pregnancy to term, but you won’t change your mind and demand that you have rights and access to this child. It’s very common for surrogates to deliver twins, or triplets. It’s very expensive technology, and it’s largely a high failure rate, so a surrogate is encouraged to deliver a multiple birth so that the consumers—the buyers—get a baby in the end. That’s what this is all about—getting a baby. So a surrogate who is willing to carry twins or triplets can even get a higher amount of money because of the risk and onerous effort to produce three and four babies at a time.

You don’t have to go very far in just picking a newspaper or a tabloid magazine to see the faces of surrogate mothers. Outside the United States, [it is the] low indigent, uneducated, poor women, destitute poverty in India, Thailand, Nepal, Mexico, where there’s a booming growing market. Here in the United States, military wives are heavily recruited and marketed to, [and asked] to serve God, to serve country, to serve another couple and help make dreams come true and become a paid surrogate. So—again back to the Hollywood tabloids—you’ll never see the wealthy Hollywood actress offering to be a surrogate mother for her low-income housekeeper. It will always be the low-income woman who is serving couples of affluence. How many affluent women want to be pregnant for nine months only to help somebody and deliver baby at the end of that pregnancy to a low-income woman? It doesn’t work that way, and we are naive if we think that wealthy women are serving the poor. It’s the poor serving the wealthy.

You are obviously having to trick a woman’s body into becoming pregnant in a very unnatural way. Here is a woman [who is] not… becoming pregnant the old-fashioned way; rather, she’s being manipulated through powerful hormones to prepare her uterus to accept the pregnancy that’s not her own. And so these women do have to take hormones to not only prime and prepare their uterus to accept an embryo into the womb, but then they also have to stay on extended periods of hormones to actually secure that pregnancy that the embryo is implanted and the pregnancy is coming along. It’s an unnatural thing we’re doing here, and so we’re trying to mimic, if you will, nature by inducing from these hormones. In our film “Breeders,” we tell the story of four different women, and we had traditional surrogates in the film, we had gestational surrogates in the film, we had surrogates who were helping family members have a child, we have surrogates who are helping strangers, we had surrogates who were doing it for free—purely altruistic—and those who were being paid because they needed the money. And no matter which way you slice the argument, all of these women regret their decision. And they regret it because of health risk and health complications, and because of bonding and attachment to the children that they were carrying, and a whole host of other reasons.”

The forgotten history of eugenics was less than a hundred years ago. The marginalized and impoverished are still harmed by the laws and practices put into place by progressive thinkers of the twentieth century. Adoption trafficking and surrogacy is still largely ignored. Will liberals cease infighting long enough to honestly address the vile legacy of eugenics and Georgia Tann? Probaby not. After all, they have pronouns, “cultural appropriation” and “thought crimes” to worry about.